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IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to place in the final results, you NEED votes. The easiest way to get votes is by rating other games. Judging lasts for 3 weeks following the end of Ludum Dare. For best effect, rate 20 games as soon as possible. Rating more games is encouraged.

I think this game was very good, my only problem was that my mouse didn't seem to be very responsive. I'm not sure if it's a problem with the game or my computer, but it made the game much harder to play. I like how you made a game that was more based on having enemies run into your sword than slicing and dicing, it's cute, and makes the game stand out.

This game is incredible, if a tad long. I tried to finish it, but after the 30th level I had to call it quits. This game would have been perfect with about 6 levels, 700 is a little much for a Jam Game. I shaved before this game, and now I have to shave again.

The art style is amazing, the controls are great. The sword mechanic is also incredible, and fairly unique. I was really impressed by the whole thing.

Great game! I love the look and feel, it looks crisp! I love the animations, simple yet expressive! Also good music! The sword mechanic felt a little monotonous at the beginning, but got very interesting later on.

Amazing game and style. Final boss was hard (probably died 15 or so times) but the game was so good I had to see the end. Amazing art style. Jump physics were too floaty but easily fixed. The horse was awesome! My pal, the horse. Loved his additional mechanics.

Very very fun.
It took me ages to understand that I could move the sword with the mouse (first encounter with Pard) and I had fun anyway ^^ I even thought it was very innovative to forbid the player to turn away.
The game is a bit light on theme, but it is excellent overall. I wish I could use the W to jump though, and space to jump off the horse. Because A+D+Space+Mouse...Hey! I'm just an human, I only have two hands!

Super slick art style and combat mechanics! I appreciated all the special effects put into this one, really made it feel like the sword hits had "impact". Pard is awesome! The game felt a little too long though, especially as there are not much changing between the levels, by the time I came to the boss I became a little frustrated it just spawned more enemies and that the sequence restarted everytime I died. Just having him shoot projectiles that you could reflect or something or something different than the already utilised enemies had been nice. Other than that, the game felt really polished, Pard is awesome and so is the music. Really nice work, would love to see this made into a full fledged game! :D

Strega: Awesome game. Really nice graphics and great simple combat. I feel like the some of the enemies have too much health though, at times I would just sit there and wait for them to kill themselves. Maybe you could have the player velocity correspond with how much damage you deal.

Looks and sounds great as everyone has said. It plays fairly well, though I found it dragged on a little bit, and by the end I'd went a bit mad from wiggling my mouse around for the combat. I constantly kept wanting to click to attack, it felt much like I was just putting my sword in the right place and waiting for the enemy to run into it!

By far, one of the best entries I have seen so far. Very polished, making it baffling how you managed to make such a great game in so little time! The gameplay was smooth with no apparent glitches and I found the way to move the sword a lot more interesting than the typical "press (whatever button) to attack". The only downfall is the amount of levels this has, making it impossible to play entirely through in my limited amount of time.

Incredible game. The 8 directions arts ( dont know how to name that ) is good and color choice is perfect.
The different game mechanics are very innovative and Pard is lovable, my best friend, I wish I could bring him with me for further LD26 gametest :D The only bad part is probably leveldesign, most levels was boring or very oddly designed... For example I dont understand the use for rest room with only hearts in a game with infinite continues, maybe there's a special perfect run ending ?
I played until the boss and give up there but mostly because of my computer, the game is very laggy on my netbook.

One of the most amitious game I have ever saw in a Ludum Dare Competion.
Congratulations !

For some reason, I had a weird bug for the boss fight: I could hit both tiny pig soldiers until I killed one and then the other didn't register the collision of either my or my horse's sword. I guessed you somehow destroyed the two collision. After trying a few time I succeeded though.

But overall nice game idea, and you managed to find some really cool pseudo-coop mecanisms =)

You know, when I first saw the gifs of this posted on the blog I had a feeling it was going to be pretty special. This entry really shines, I think. It's got a great style, great music, and an invincible horse to do your bidding.

You really packed a lot of gameplay into such a small package. Hats off to you.

Love the look of the game, and the music is excellent! Double jump wouldn't work for me though, and found the best way to fight was just to stick the sword out and let the baddies jump into it. Maybe work speed into the damage, so you have to be moving the sword to kill them? Brilliant style though. Great game!

Very impressive. The graphics and sound are very polished. I love the art style. The sword control mechanic is interesting at first, but I felt it got a little tedious since it take so many hits to kill the enemies.

This is a really solid game. The mechanics are simple but fresh, and the way the double jumping and the horse add to the game are simply brilliant. Usually double jumping is really just a key for a lock, but the way you implemented combat means that it's an extra, risky tactical option. With the horse it also opens up things like flanking and strategy. Really well done! My only complaint is that the key opening the door in stages where you kill all enemies is kind of redundant, and sometimes breaks the flow by making you backtrack to get it. But I can also see how it's easier to do that programming-wise.

Nice game. Graphics and Audio were nicely done. Having to use Space instead of W to jump was a bit awkward for me and took awhile to get used to. The sword mechanic was fun, but sometimes my sword was inside an enemy and it wasn't getting hurt, and I couldn't figure out why.

A fun game with some excellent ideas and gameplay mechanics. Lowering enemy defenses is really hard, I found wildly swinging the sword while jumping around worked best. Really liked the horse companion. Graphics and music was admirable. Well Done =]

I was a little frustrated by a game-breaking bug in your input system. You're not calling preventDefault() or stopPropagation() (or both) on the event object in your keydown/keypress handler, so pressing a key to move bubbles up to my browser (FF 20) and pops open my typeahead find feature, taking focus away from the game and consuming all further input. I make HTML5 games myself, so I'm super-sensitive to it. =) I had to switch to my backup browser to play.

Very polished. Love the character art and simple level design. You packed a lot of content into such a short development cycle. I noticed you pretty much had to attack the pigs from the left since their swords reset to the right after a hit.

Bringing in the horse with a sword and providing a riding option was awesome.

It's a lot harder to play with a trackpad since the game rewards you for swinging your sword back and forth. It would probably work well with a twin-stick controller.

Super cool. This is awesome! Great artwork. Got stuck on the push down level and didn't see how to restart until coming back to page - would love to see those hints in game. Great work! Overall, reminded me of die by the sword. :)

Literally the best game I've ever played in a Ludum Dare :) Seriously, it's got an unbelievable amount of polish, a bit of a storyline, and a really interesting game mechanic. My only issue was, if anything, that it was too short - please, please make a Post-Compo version with loads more (and saving) - I'd quite happily pay for it if it was on Steam (or equivalent)!

Thank you for all the kind comments guys! What an overwhelming response! :D
We're looking at all the feedback and taking notes on what to improve. We both fell in love with pard while creating the game and it would be a shame to let the adventure end here. :P
Thank you for playing. But thank you most of all for allowing pard into your hearts. :)

Very cool! The only frustrating part was that the angle of the sword would move when my character moved even though my mouse was still. Could fix that by ensuring the player's character is always centered.

Absolutely brilliant visually - I love this kind of geometric look. The sound design is great, too.
As for the game itself, it got old quite quickly for me. There's something about the passive act of letting enemies impale themselves on your sword that I don't find too exciting.

The use of the theme is 50/50 for me. The combat is minimalistic, indeed; a little too much, maybe, as I already pointed out. But the rest of the game's design is standard platforming fare. Simplistic, you may say, but not minimalistic.

Also, why the choice to use SPACE to jump, instead of 'W'? It seems counter-intuitive to me, and not too comfortable.

All in all, a very nice game with huge potential for a post-compo version that moves away from the theme, that I think doesn't add anything to the game.

Sorry, i revisited my judgment because i think this game doesn't fit the theme at all. Even the gameplay isn't minimalist. Some said this game must win the jam, i think the opposite, if it wins there is no more interest to follow a theme. A good game but completely irrelevant.

The controls are awkward, the jump is quite floppy and I don't really see the "minimalist" part (even gameplay wise).
Apart from that, I had a lot of fun playing (I finished it eagerly), the level design is very well done and the whole graphic & audio work is fantastic !

Very innovative, light hearted fun! I loved it. I wish there was a different control scheme for moving the sword though, maybe have it centered around the middle of the screen or maybe when you click it puts down a point that you rotate around? Idk, just felt awkward trying to keep up with the hero's movements.

Thank you mildmojo. :)
I'd also like to add that:
There are no combat buttons to attack with, the combat sytem is completely minimalist but creates depth without making it complex.
The artstyle is minimalist, clean, doesn't add anything that is unnescesarry.
We created something original instead of just taking the first google hit, the Mondriaan style and saying: "Wow! Our game is DEFINITELEY minimalist now!"
'completely irrelevant' is hardly the case, I think we did a great job on capturing the theme without sacrificing too much of the gameplay, art or content etc.

I respect all your opinions, but when you have to say "the game doesn't follow the theme." Please do elaborate on why it doesn't.

Incredible fun and amazing art style. Only complaint is that the web version repeatedly broke my sound driver (pulse). But the desktop linux version worked perfectly. Probably the best game I have played this Ludum Dare.

That was fantastic!!
I can't believe how complete it felt for being created in such a short time!
And I love how you would introduce new controls by having the player tell his horse what he was going to do.

Super cool, but I noticed a few problems. I found the combat to be pretty fun, but it's quite easy to get hit due to the way the "invincible enemy" thing works after you damage them. Instead of being able to juggle enemies in the air, they would just fall through my sword after I hit them once. The small enemies also took a bit to kill, which really slowed down the pace of the game, which I found detrimental. I also found pushing the boxes around to be a bit frustrating, as the physics didn't always play nice. Do I have to push the boxes with my sword? Wasn't intuitive to me. Finally, why were the boxes rendered at a 45 degree angle? That was weird to me, kind of perspective-destroying.

Despite those issues, however, I thought it was a really fun game. With a bit of tweaking and polish, you could definitely turn it into a great little game.

Very nice, I like it - also runs great in IE10. The only complaint I've got is the sword fighting. That's introduced almost a bit too late. I nearly lost interest "oh it's the same over and over again", and then that fighter pig appeared... :)

Wow, one of my favourite entries. Enough difference in gameplay to keep it interesting and the end boss was quite a blast. It gave me some serious Zelda flashbacks, only in this game the idea is executed cooler, much more energetic.

Excellent game! The characters are well designed and the gameplay has a good progression that made me play until the end.
I'm not a huge fan of the idea of controlling the sword with the mouse, it's original but get tedious quickly.

Very nice. You guys have a really, really strong combat system with these swords. And the graphics are fantastic. My only complaint that can be of any use to you guys is that pressing W is a bad choice for dismounting. I kept pressing W when I wanted to jump out of habit from other games, and I'd dismount against my will.

Another thought: if there were a game that controlled the sword similar to this, except that clicking thrusted the sword and allowed for slash attacks (i.e. hold the mouse button while swinging forward) then that would be a very cool game. ;)

Great work! I love the graphics, the sound effects, the music and the setting... I mean... a horse buddy with a sword and fighting pigs... just great. Was fun to play through. Two things I noticed: during the bossfight there was one of the smaller pigfighters who was invulnerable (I let me killed by him and tried it again and then it worked). Secondly, sometimes I didn't notice that I lost a heart, so that should be communicated better.

Lancing potatoes from horseback thrilled me. If you continue to develop this, sometimes the horse's sword would not seem to hit the pig, and clicking the horse and then pressing jump button to get on the horse confused me.

Very cool idea with the fighting mechanic, but it's spoiled by too large number of HPs the monsters have -- waiting for them to impale themselves on my sword enough times is boring, and not waiting makes you die...

Pretty awesome game. Became really interesting when the horse joins your party. Also, dunno if this is some sort of bug or glitch but if you jump (unmounted) then constantly keep clicking on the horse while you're in the air, you pretty much get unlimited jumps in the air (sorta).

Thank you mildmojo for your precision, i didn't know the jam was less strict about the theme.
Sorry _Rillem ! I have overreacted, probably because i was jealous about how your game is great ^' My apologies !

Just excellent game overall. The simple mechanics of pointing, the teaching itself level design, and that horse maybe is one of the best videogame characters ever. You sirs, deserve a lot. Genuine fun!

Easily one of my favorites for this LD, even if it did result in another failure to my "I'm going to go to bed earlier tonight" scheme. Great work, loved the audio in particular, and the graphics were simple but great. Had some issues with my cursor disappearing when it wasn't moving that threw me off a tad, but otherwise no issues at all.

Back for more. Just played it though again for about the fifth time. Still my favorite game here.
The AI on Pard seems a bit off on the level with the two moving platforms and four pigs, after first killing one of the two to the right pard will always go to the left and get stuck, sometimes falling down the abyss.

This is so much fun! XD
Pig-wizard is driving me nuts, but I just need to hone my horseback sword-fighting skills a bit more and I'm certain i can defeat him and his evil minions.
Serious contender for first place here I'm sure.

Combat system of this game is unusual but very cool (control sword’s direction by mouse).
This feature was enough to get good rating but beyond that the gameplay is constantly changing and does not get bored. There are a lot new abilities during game (unexpected but awesome).
And stylish graphic. And logic puzzle. And bosses. And humour. The best one.

Not very clear keyboard control, but it is not critical. I willing to buy full version :)

Rampage ! Come on my sword :) !
(the double jump works only with "space" and not with arrows)

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